Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  “What is that?”

  The pages were larger than normal, the long format of legal documents.

  “This is a trust document,” Ridley said. “Dated October second, 2004. You know what’s special about that time and this place. I don’t need to explain it to you. All that matters to you are contained in a few lines.”

  He knew the document so well he could have recited the lines from memory, but still he flipped through the pages. They deserved to be read once more.

  “‘To be executed ten years from the date of this agreement or at the time of my death, whichever comes first,’” he read aloud, “‘with the stipulation that all terms of this agreement are rendered wholly null and void if the circumstances of my death are determined to be the result of criminal action.’”

  Julianne was staring at him with an expression he’d never seen on her face before.

  “What is this?” she said. “Why was this agreement made?”

  “Let me finish. Let me read the beautiful line, the one that gave me hope and patience for so long.” He worked his tongue around his mouth in a fruitless attempt to bring moisture to it, and then read, “‘At which time all holdings of Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust will become the property of Cecil Buckner and Ridley Barnes.’”

  Julianne didn’t speak. Ridley took a deep breath and shook his head. “How much that meant to me, I can’t explain. But those were in different times. Patience can hold you only so far in the absence of truth. Cecil doesn’t understand that, because Cecil doesn’t have the same questions. I’ll trade for the truth. It’s a bargain I hate to make, but I’ll trade the trust for the truth.”

  He was speaking more to the cave than to Julianne now. He fed the title page of the document into the candle flame. The flame chewed around the edge of the paper and flared brightly but then died, leaving one charred corner. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “She has no use for documents,” he said. “Certainly no use for talk of ownership. I always understood that. My request was that I be referred to as a steward of Trapdoor Caverns. That was the role I wanted. Apparently, it was not the right legal term, but it’s all I wanted to be.”

  He set the partially burned document aside and took the knife in his hand. “Now it’s about to be your show,” he said. “Are you ready for that?”

  “Let’s talk more about this.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “We will talk about Sarah. Where she was found, how she was found. You’ll have to trust the cave. We’re so much closer to the truth now. All you have to do is open the door for me. You’re the only one who can do that.”

  For a long time she was silent, but when she finally spoke, her voice was perfect, the cadence he’d come to know and require.

  “If you would like to face the water and focus on that portal, you may do so,” she said.

  He turned obediently, and now Julianne and the candle were in his peripheral vision, a flickering in the corner of his right eye. He could see the shadow line of the stream and the place where it disappeared. He turned to look at her. With the blackness at her back and the candlelight before her and those pale clothes and her blond hair, she seemed to glow.

  “I’ll need total darkness,” he said.

  “Even from the candle?”

  “Yes. I’ll need it the way it was back then.”

  She hesitated, but then she leaned her face close to the candle’s warm, soft light, parted her lips, and exhaled soundlessly, and the candle extinguished and they belonged to the blackness.

  “All right. Let’s work our way toward that day together, shall we?” she said. “Always together. Never alone. Remember that you are never alone here.”

  Not a problem, Ridley thought. Not in Trapdoor.

  “You may focus on that spot,” Julianne said. “On that portal. It may be the place where the present ceases for you and the past begins. Take your time if you wish, and maybe you will wish to let the water guide you. You may wish to remember all of the days we have done these exercises together and all of the progress you have made. Your confidence and your strength. Remember that you are required to follow it only as far as you wish.”

  He’d worked with her long enough to understand the double message here, the way she was using the word remember as often as possible, a guide that went beyond the surface message.

  “Whenever you are ready, you may focus all of your attention on that portal,” she said, her voice rising and falling in subtle shifts. “You may begin to consider all of the places that it can take you. All of the places that lie beyond. You may remember those now, if you choose. You may vocalize those, if you choose. The seeing is within your reach and yours alone. You know this, and you know that even though it is dark to me, it is not to you.”

  “Yes,” Ridley said in a dried-out whisper. “Yes.”

  “Would you like to approach it now? Would you like to pass through it and tell me some things about what lies beyond?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen to the water and to the other sounds that you might hear, sounds perhaps different than those that I can hear.”

  He knew what she could hear: the steady, tinny drip of water from the ceiling, plinking down into a puddle that was patiently working its way through the stone, unhurried by the passing centuries. It was a pleasant sound, not unlike the ticking of a clock. In its own way, that was exactly what it was.

  “Allow yourself to pass through, if you wish. Give yourself that permission now. Permission to go down that path. Moving forward, yes, but also backward. As far back as you choose. You know the path. You’ve been on it before. Follow it now, if you wish. Follow it and see where it leads. I will count down from ten to one, and when I reach one, you will be on the path as you once were before.”

  Ridley closed his eyes even though he was in blackness, and his head bobbed in rhythm with her voice, and his thumb worked lightly over the knife. Though it drew blood, he felt no pain.

  58

  Mark was on his hands and knees again, freshening the bruises from his last time in this terrible place. If you wanted to make it out of Trapdoor alive, you had to be willing to spend some time on your knees. There was no other option.

  The pain from the bruises was bad but the memories it triggered were much worse. Each ache forced him to recall the way it had been down here before, when he was alone and shivering in the blackness. When he had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life: I cannot save myself.

  These memories should have made him even more grateful for the light, but instead he found a strange resentment of it. He maneuvered through the tunnel without needing to make any effort or even give any thought to avoiding the walls and the rocks, and he felt almost outraged by how simple it seemed. He knew what he’d earned in the dark, he knew how hard it had come, how much it had taken from both mind and body. That anything so arduous could be made so easy felt almost insulting, a mocking of what he had achieved.

  The tunnel opened up, and the flashlight exposed a wide chamber with high ceilings and an odd, staggered floor that looked almost like bleachers, as if the water had carved seating for some grand performance. The Chapel Room, he assumed. There was no trace of Ridley or Julianne, but there was blood from Cecil. Less of it now, spaced out by larger distances.

  Mark set down the rifle and withdrew Ridley’s map once more and checked. Yes, this was the Chapel Room. Here again he had options—three passages, one that went up to a second level of the cave, one that went straight ahead, and one that curled to the right. The passages both directly ahead and to the right took you to the Funnel Room, the place where they had first heard Mark’s voice. According to the dimensions on the map, the passage to the right was much larger, a walking passage with a twelve-foot ceiling. The passage ahead was labeled in Ridley’s scrawl—belly crawl, very tig
ht. The wider passage was a much longer trip toward the same destination, a distance of a quarter of a mile to achieve what the belly crawl would do in three hundred feet.

  He stepped back and moved the light around and saw that what looked like one rock angled in front of another was actually a gap in the wall. The obvious opening was a dead end, but the hidden one led on. There was blood on the floor here. Cecil had taken the walking passage.

  Mark hesitated and looked back at Ridley’s map. For ease of access, he should follow Cecil’s route. If he took the crawl, though, and he moved fast enough, he could pull ahead of Cecil.

  He turned from the open passage and walked back to the crawl without allowing any pause for reflection. When he saw the opening, it did not look so bad: a gap at least three feet high and equally wide. Easy going. He dropped back down to his hands and knees then and shone the light into the tunnel and saw a shelf of rock ceiling so low that it didn’t look as if a basketball could roll through.

  “No,” he whispered. “Not worth it.”

  That was when he heard a voice. Too soft to be understood but undeniably human. He ducked lower, listened. Heard the voice again and this time he recognized it: Julianne’s.

  She was alive, and she was speaking. Cecil Buckner, who had left behind a gruesome scene that made no sense to Mark, was heading toward her. How close Cecil was to her, Mark didn’t know, but thanks to Ridley’s map, Mark knew exactly how close he was—three hundred feet. One football field, that was all.

  One football field that he would have to crawl over on his belly, his shoulders squeezed on each side, the ceiling brushing his head.

  He lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled forward, once more pushing the .22 ahead of him with his left hand while holding the flashlight in his right. Five feet in, then ten, and he was feeling fine, he believed that the visual intimidation of the crawl was harder than the process.

  Then his shoulders brushed the walls. No big deal. Just wriggle forward. He lifted his head so he could extend his elbows.

  His head cracked off the stone ceiling, and when he lowered it, his chin bounced off the floor.

  Terror now. A flood of it. Not even fifteen feet in and he felt trapped, felt as if he should scramble backward.

  He closed his eyes. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and over his eyelid and across his lips. He licked it away, tasting the salt. Opened his eyes.

  Everything ahead of him was blurred. The passage was too low, too narrow, too dark.

  But he could breathe. He could breathe and he could move.

  He also knew where it led. He knew that because Ridley Barnes had passed through here before. More than once. He’d passed through it with enough calm and composure to not only see where it led but chart its dimensions. Belly crawl, very tight.

  A voice became audible again. Julianne’s. Soothing, composed. What she’d endured to this point Mark had no idea, but he’d seen Danielle MacAlister’s corpse. He knew what waited ahead for her.

  We’ll all end up here, he thought. It’s just a matter of time. I’ll join them all down here. Sarah Martin. Diane Martin. Lauren.

  He crawled ahead. Ten feet, fifteen, twenty. His breathing came too fast and his heart thundered. For the second time in this cave, he thought that he heard snakes, but there weren’t any. This time he had the light to prove it. He paused for a few seconds and steadied himself and then pushed on. Again he tried to look up and banged his head and felt a shudder of pain all the way along his spine. There was a reason you were supposed to wear a helmet. He crawled on, shoving the rifle in front of him, and he was cursing his slow progress when he heard two voices, a man’s voice joining Julianne’s, and this time he could understand the words, and the first one that registered was light.

  He clicked off the flashlight, sure that they were speaking of him and were aware of his arrival. The instant the light was gone he had no idea where he was. The totality of the darkness was like a physical thing. His thumb moved toward the switch again but he willed it down and did not touch it. Instead, he crept forward slowly, moving as quietly as possible. He no longer believed the distance on Ridley’s map. It had to be a lie. Mark had been crawling for more than a hundred yards. A half a mile at least. Two miles. The distance was as endless as the darkness.

  The words became clear just as the walls widened and the ceiling lifted. Julianne and Ridley were speaking, and they were not far from him. It seemed they were in a room just around the bend, but that meant they were in total darkness. All that existed of them was their voices. It gave the situation an eerie quality of unreality. Ridley’s voice had been low and sluggish when it first became audible but now it was sharp, his words racing.

  “She’s there and I can hear her and I know that I can’t go back because it sounds as if she’s hurting. Hurting and afraid but so close. She is so close and that means I can’t go back, I have to go forward or I might lose her. And it’s a problem because the light is getting dim; it’s getting dark and so I have to hurry.”

  Mark shifted his hand so he could reach the rifle’s trigger. Then he heard Julianne.

  “Why is the light getting dim?” she asked, but there was no light in their room, and Mark finally understood what was happening. Ridley’s rapid account was being spoken in the present tense but the story came from the past. He was talking about Sarah Martin.

  Ridley said, “Batteries, batteries, I’ve been running this lamp too long, the whole time down here, and there’s another one behind me but I can’t go back for it now because I can hear her and I can’t lose her, this is why I’m in the cave, I came for her, right? I came for her. The crawl is tight, very narrow, squeezes the shoulders, and I can’t believe she came this way. I can’t believe it. She was not skilled enough to get here, but she is here. No one else has been here, so how did she make it? Just a scared girl in the dark. How did she make it? She couldn’t have made it.”

  “If you didn’t believe you would find her in this place, what led you to it?”

  “I take what the cave gives me. It’s one of the only rules.”

  “Who makes those rules?”

  “The cave. The rules have always been here, but you understand them better in the dark.”

  Mark was relieved that he’d turned off his light. He hadn’t wanted to go dark in this place ever again, but if Ridley believed these were the rules, it was better not to disturb him. He wasn’t sure whether to advance or wait. Without being able to see what was before him, he couldn’t make a call on how to proceed. It seemed to be just the two of them, no demonstrated danger, but Cecil Buckner was circling from the other side.

  “Continue along the journey,” Julianne said.

  “It’s dark by the time I make the top of the crawl. Battery’s done, it’s dead, I’ve made it all the way now but I don’t have light and I can’t go back because she’s so close. So I shout.”

  Mark didn’t like the use of the present tense. It suggested Ridley wasn’t recalling the past as much as reliving it. Still, he was entranced by it, because what Ridley was telling Julianne now was the thing he’d refused to share for ten years.

  “What do you shout at her?” Julianne asked.

  “That I’m coming for her. That she will be safe.”

  “Does she answer?”

  “Yes. She asks me to stop. She says, ‘Please, stop.’ But that doesn’t make any sense because she’s lost and she’s hurt and she needs help. So I keep climbing, and she says, ‘Please, stop,’ and I think that she is talking to me but it’s to the cave.”

  “Why do you think it’s to the cave?”

  “Because the cave tries to kill me. And then I do the wrong thing. I fight it.”

  “How do you fight it?”

  “With my knife. The dark man, he has me by the throat. I have no lights anymore but I still have the knife.”

  “Who is the dark man?”

  “He belongs to the cave. He’s always been here.”

  Mark thought, Here
we go, here we lose him, any chance of getting the truth dies with the madness of the dark man, but Julianne countered Ridley beautifully.

  “How can you fight someone who has always been here?” she asked.

  “With my knife. I grab it and I slam the blade backward, again and again, and he’s screaming now.”

  “Screaming because you are causing him pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s always been in the cave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see how these things might create a problem when considered together?”

  There was a long pause. Finally, Ridley’s voice returned: “He should be hard to hurt. Impossible to hurt.”

  She was getting him to confront his own fiction or hallucination or whatever it was. Mark could hardly breathe. There was no police interview that could have delivered this. No interrogation. He wouldn’t have believed that before, but he was sure of it now.

  “If he is eternal, it seems he should be difficult to hurt, yes,” Julianne said. “But you’re certain you hurt him?”

  “Yes. I am certain. And then I have to make him stop. I have to silence him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when he screams, she screams, and so I need him to stop, I have to make him stop. So I do. It’s a mistake, though. It is a terrible mistake. Because now he can’t tell me where she is, and he’s the one who knows. Who knew. I should have stopped when he screamed.”

  Mark could hear Ridley sobbing between the words now.

  “I should have let him keep screaming, that is better than the way it is now, because he can’t talk, and he’s the one who knows where she is. And now I can’t see and I don’t know where to go. It’s dark all around but I can still hear her. She’s so close, but I can’t see! And I think…I think he was providing for her, maybe? At least he knew how to find her. But now he can’t go back. Because of me. So I’m going to have to find her in the dark and I will have to find her fast, because if I don’t, if I don’t…”

  “What happens if you don’t?”